GUIDE · DOCUMENTS
The certificate was valid when you checked it. That is the problem.
Every accreditation process checks documents once, at approval. Every event then runs for weeks. Public liability lapses, inductions time out, a card expires between the build and the show, and the pass in somebody’s pocket says nothing about any of it.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Document checks at approval create a snapshot, not a state. The gap between the check and the gate is where the risk lives: a certificate approved in March can be expired by the August show while the credential still scans. The fix is to store the expiry date as data rather than filing the document, flag it before it lapses, and decide in advance which documents should stop a scan and which should just raise a flag.
Why filing the document is not checking it
Most accreditation processes collect documents as attachments. Someone uploads a public liability certificate, an approver opens it, sees a date in the future, and approves. The PDF goes in a folder.
Nothing about that process knows when the certificate expires. The expiry date was read by a human once and never recorded anywhere a system can act on. Six weeks later the date passes and nothing happens, because nothing was watching.
The change that matters is small: capture the expiry date as a field when the document is approved. Once it is data, everything else is possible. Until it is data, nothing is.
The three windows that matter
Once expiry is a date in a system, the useful thing is not the alert on the day. It is the alert with enough notice for somebody to do something about it.
- 30 days out: enough time for a supplier to renew an insurance policy without paying for urgency.
- 14 days out: enough time to escalate to whoever owns the relationship.
- 7 days out: enough time to plan for that supplier not being on site.
- Expired: a decision, not a notification.
Which documents should stop a scan
This is the question people skip, and it is the only one that matters at the gate. Not every expired document should turn a person away, and treating them all the same either creates a queue of stranded crew or trains your gate staff to override everything.
The honest framing is a two by two: how bad is it if this person works without a current document, and how quickly can it be fixed on site. An expired site induction is bad and fixable in ten minutes, so it should block and there should be somewhere to send them. A lapsed public liability certificate is bad and not fixable at a gate at six in the morning, so it should have been escalated a fortnight ago and the decision at the gate is a management one.
Write the policy down before the show. A gate steward at three in the morning is not the person who should be inventing it.
What Bloop does today, and what it does not
Supplier documents are tracked with their expiry dates, and flagged at 30, 14 and 7 days and on expiry, with a summary you can act on rather than a list you have to read.
At the gate, the scan itself evaluates three conditions: whether the credential is active, whether the induction is current, and whether a show stop is in force. An out of date induction genuinely does stop a badge, offline included.
Supplier document expiry does not block the scan by itself yet. It is tracked and flagged, and it is on the roadmap to become a gate condition, and until it is we are not going to write a headline that implies otherwise. If you need an expired insurance certificate to physically stop someone at a gate today, the honest answer is that you need a person to make that call, and what we give you is the flag two weeks earlier so that person is not surprised.
Written from running accreditation on live events, and generalised so it is useful whatever you run it on. Last reviewed: 24 August 2026.
QUESTIONS THIS PAGE GETS ASKED
Which documents do you actually need to collect?
Fewer than most accreditation forms ask for. Collect what a zone genuinely requires and what you would be asked to produce afterwards. Every extra document is one somebody has to chase, store, and then track the expiry of, which is three costs for one field.
Suppliers keep sending certificates that expire mid-event. What do we do?
Make the requirement explicit in the allocation rather than at approval: cover must be valid through the last day of break, not the first day of build. It is a one line change to what you ask for, and it removes an entire category of problem.
Should an expired document block the scan?
Some should, some should not, and the value is in having decided which before the show. Inductions are the clearest case for blocking, because they are serious and fixable on site in minutes. Insurance is the clearest case against, because a gate at dawn cannot fix it and turning a whole crew away has consequences of its own.
Does this need software?
It needs the expiry dates in a column and somebody looking at that column on a schedule. A spreadsheet can do it. What a spreadsheet will not do is tell the gate, which is the point at which it stops being an administrative task and starts being an access control one.